


No more nightmares (I’ve seen them all)

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Future Fic, Happy Ending, M/M, Sharing a Bed, Slice of Life, either way it's a, potentially? could also be season 10 fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 10:01:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25348894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: The bedroom door is open, like an invitation, which gently tugs at something in his chest. Steve is expecting someone.Or: Danny comes home in the middle of the night.
Relationships: Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 26
Kudos: 287





	No more nightmares (I’ve seen them all)

**Author's Note:**

> I continue on my journey through my WIP document in an attempt to clear out fics that were nearly done but that I never posted for some reason! Today’s special: a tiny but concentrated dose of fluff. I remember I didn’t like this when I wrote it, which is why it’s been lying around for a year waiting for me to face it again and decide that it’s definitely not as bad as I had completely convinced myself it was.
> 
> The title comes from the lyrics of _I don’t believe in love_ by Queensrÿche, but please note that the song has absolutely nothing to do with this fic (very conflicting vibes, I’d say) and I’ve taken this one line completely out of context to be cute and fluffy and mean that the bad stuff lies behind them.

The house is quiet when Danny slips inside. He puts down his bags and locks the door and the snick of the lock is loud against the backdrop of only the faint, ever-present tumble of the waves in the distance.

He doesn’t bother turning on a light. It would be harsh and artificial and by the time he’s lining up his shoes next to the stairs his eyes have already adjusted to what little illumination is naturally there. The moon is almost full tonight and the sky is clear. There’s enough of a glow filtering in through the windows to get a vague idea of familiar shapes and forms, and even that is more than he really needs.

He hushes up the stairs on socked feet. The fourth and fifteenth steps creak more than the others, but he doesn’t have to count to know which ones they are. Even when dead tired, he makes the effort to skip them out of long ingrained habit.

The bedroom door is open, like an invitation, which gently tugs at something in his chest. Steve is expecting someone. Steve himself might have started out that way, too, but he’s out cold now. Danny pauses in the door opening for a moment just to watch.

The blanket is pushed halfway down Steve’s chest, the moonlight limning the dips and angles of his shoulders and arms and face with an otherworldly sheen. The way Steve is curled up is utterly mundane in contrast. He’s keeping very carefully to one half of the bed – again, the wordless implication that he’s waiting for someone – and he’s on his side, facing the door and the empty space on the mattress. His face rests on one pillow, but he’s holding another one, arms wrapped around it like they felt empty.

Danny undresses. He leaves his clothes in a crumpled heap on the floor – sacrilege? sure, but he’s a man with priorities – and pulls the bathroom door shut behind him with both hands and a lot of care, hoping to block out as much of the sound as possible while he performs his ablutions. 

When he gets back, Steve hasn’t moved an inch. Danny checks to make sure he already texted Grace that his plane landed safely, then sets and deletes and sets an alarm, and then, finally, he can make the mattress dip under his weight. Of course that’s the easy part. He knows from experience that it’s much harder to reclaim his own pillow from Steve’s arms, or to get Steve to concede even a foot of that blanket he’s barely using in the first place.

But Danny has learned more than that: he has a tried and true strategy. His opening salvo is a two for one, in that he leans very close to kiss Steve’s temple. It’s both something that settles the ache in his chest that starts pushing whenever he doesn’t lay eyes on Steve for more than twenty-four hours, and it softens Steve’s sleepy defenses. Steve snuffles, shifts, and with some wiggling and quick reflexes, Danny manages to free his pillow. He puts it at the head of the bed and sets to work tugging at the blanket, carefully but persistently.

He pauses when Steve makes a smacking noise and stretches a bit. Steve’s knuckles graze Danny’s side and suddenly he has Steve’s arm slung across his stomach and over six foot of warm and cuddly SEAL trying to get closer. He gives a clever pull and gains some blanket ground during Steve’s move, though it seems like he might not need it after all, now that there’s a space heater wrapping itself around him.

“You’re back,” the space heater says against Danny’s jaw, voice low and gravelly from sleep and words half slurred, like he probably won’t remember saying it even if Danny wakes him up right now.

“Yeah,” Danny whispers. “Go back to sleep, babe.”

Steve mumbles something incomprehensible that could be _I love you_ or could be a curse on Danny’s family, though some options seem more likely than others. He presses pliant lips to Danny’s neck and finally settles back down with a big, content sigh, after which he assumes the deep breathing pattern of sleep again.

Danny, his body warm and his heart full and both settled in the most comfortable spot they can be, follows him not long after.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, thank you for reading my words, comments are the best possible gift, and I hope your heart also finds a warm spot to settle down and be loved. ❤
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


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